Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system in which a plurality of image forming apparatuses are connected to each other to form images simultaneously.
Image forming apparatuses incorporating a page memory are conventionally known.
A digital copying machine is considered as an apparatus of this type. A reader and a printer which constitute a digital copying machine may be independently used as an image reading device and an image output device, respectively. Therefore, a system has been proposed in which a reader/printer is used as an image I/O apparatus by connecting it to a general purpose computer system by using an external I/F apparatus. In another proposed system, a plurality of pairs of readers and printers are separately connected, and a central control means is provided for controlling them. In this system, a high copy volume (CV) is ensured by the simultaneous use of the printers.
In these systems, a page memory is an essential component to increase the speed of image output, and it is a natural trend to transfer images from an external device such as a computer as discussed above and store them in a memory for subsequent output. However, the difference between transfer schemes for image data (especially color-separated image data) is not taken into consideration.
In addition, since each apparatus of a single system has its own page memory, the memory capacity of the entire system is significantly increased.
If the memory capacity of each apparatus is decreased, however, it becomes necessary to supply image data each time an individual apparatus forms an image. This makes it impossible to maintain a high CV within a short period of time.